Friday, November 27, 2015

Bibles Removed, Deviant Sex Housing Added—IL Univ.

Northern Illinois University (NIU) in DeKalb agrees with atheists that free Bibles have no place in guest rooms at its Holmes Student Center, and also agrees with homosexualists that designated accommodations are appropriate for students who are sexually confused (transgender) and those who claim various deviant sexual labels.

The added [gender-inclusive] housing option is one of many ways NIU is reaching out to students in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. The acronym is sometimes extended to include queer, intersex and asexual. On a basic level, queer is a fluid label that acknowledges being outside societal norms in regard to gender or sexuality. Individuals born with ambiguous genitalia or bodies that appear neither typically male nor female identify as intersex. And people who are asexual do not experience sexual attraction.

[Molly Holmes] also oversees Transitions, a club that helps transgender students meet and learn from one another. It was inspired by a transgender student intern who had difficulty navigating resources on her own in 2011.

“Transitions has been a response for what students have asked,” Holmes said. “We hear that students come here because of that group.”

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation [FFRF], discovered a Bible in a drawer last month during a stay on the DeKalb campus where she had been invited to speak by the Secular Student Alliance. Upon her return home, the foundation's lawyer wrote a letter to the Holmes Student Center director requesting the books be removed.

The ubiquitous Bibles in bedside tables come from Gideons International, an evangelical group founded more than a century ago by two men who accidentally shared a hotel room and set out to spread the Gospel in hotels across the U.S.

For decades, Gaylor said, the Freedom From Religion Foundation has taken aim at the Bibles, especially in public accommodations such as state university hotels and park lodges. Some members when they travel carry stickers to slap on the covers of hotel room Bibles — sarcastic warnings that literal belief in the book could endanger the reader's health and life.

"Even if it takes three decades of education, we're finally persuading public officials," Gaylor said. "It's an anachronism. As this country becomes more and more secular, more and more people are offended. It's a constant mop-up job."

"No one is making any guest open the Bible. No one is making them read it. In fact, the university is not 'providing bibles;' it is allowing a Christian group to place literature, the Bible, in hotel rooms much like a pizzeria may leave coupons," [American Center for Law and Justice] ACLJ Chief Counsel Jay Sekulow wrote on Thursday.

"They unbelievably claimed to be 'proselytized in the privacy of their own bedrooms.' Who knew a closed Bible's mere presence qualified as proselytizing. Yet, they called the Bible 'obnoxious' and claimed that the mere presence of the Bible in a state-run lodging was 'inappropriate and unconstitutional,'" the ACLJ described.

The ACLJ reminded the FFRF, however, that the Supreme Court has ruled that "adults should be able to withstand 'speech they find disagreeable,' without imagining that the Establishment Clause is violated every time they 'experience a sense of affront from the expression of contrary religious views.'"

"There is no coercion," Sekulow insisted. "There is no proselytizing happening here. Instead, it's once again clear that those holding themselves out to be freethinkers are threatening smaller institutions with constitutional claims that would fall flat in court. FFRF is in the business of making threats because they know that any time they go to court, they always lose."